We develop a model in which individuals compete for a fixed pool of prizes by investing effort in a contest. Individuals belong to two separate and identifiable groups. We say that the contest is discriminatory if a lower share of prizes is reserved for one group than for the other. We show that...

Myopia is important in environmental and resource management problems because they often involve inter temporal decisions over a long time horizon. We present a parsimonious extension of a standard dynamic programming equation in a continuous time and continuous state setting, which enables rich...

This paper studies identification in linear rational expectations models with news shocks. We show that news-driven models and indeterminate equilibrium economies with i.i.d. fundamentals are observationally equivalent. This finding calls for carefully designing empirical investigations of news...

This note derives the dynamic programming equation (DPE) to a differentiable Markov Perfect equilibrium in a problem with non-constant discounting and general functional forms. We begin with a discrete stage model and take the limit as the length of the stage goes to 0 to obtain the DPE...

Myopia is important in environmental and resource management. We present a parsimonious extension to a standard dynamic optimization in a continuous time and continuous state setting, which enables a rich description of myopic behavior. In our model, the process of planning future controls and...

We test for the presence of interest rate smoothing in forward looking Taylor rules in first differences. We also consider financial and asymmetric preferences indicators. We find that interest rate smoothing is not induced by an omitted variable bias.

In the past few years the view has commonly been expressed that central banks follow `Taylor Rules' (as first promulgated by Henderson and McKibbin (1993)). We show that the appearance of such an interest rate rule – a ‘pseudo-Taylor rule’ – can be created by a standard macro model in...

Thomas J. Sargent is the 2011 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences (along with Christopher Sims). Sargent has been instrumental in the development of rational expectations economics. The central idea behind this approach is that individuals should not make systematic mistakes. Yet...